Inside the Recording of Run-DMC and Aerosmith’s Genre-Bending ‘Walk This Way’

Hip-hop reigns supreme in music today, but rewind to the early 1980s and it was the faintest of blips on the national consciousness. Its big break came, argues Washington Post staff writer Geoff Edgers, unexpectedly on the back of one of rock n' roll's most iconic riffs as Steven Tyler and Joe Perry of Aerosmith teamed up with Run-DMC for a cover of their 1975 hit "Walk This Way." Edgers's book, Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song That Changed American Music Forever, recounts the wildly different trajectories that led each of these two acts to one of the most surprising partnerships in modern music.

Walk This Way: Run-DMC, Aerosmith, and the Song that Changed American Music Forever

Released in 1986, the mashup—itself a foreign concept at the time—was the brainchild of a young producer named Rick Rubin. The now seminal studio wiz offered Tyler and Perry, then both consumed by their various addictions and rattled by a diminishing profile, $8,000 to show up to a recording session in Manhattan that March with the buzzy underground act. The rest is, as they say, history, and the song is a genre-busting track that bore our first rap superstars and fundamentally altered the musical landscape forever.

In an interview with Esquire, Edgers recounts the wildest things he learned (like just how little each group thought of each other) and the most frustrating moments of his research (wild discrepancies in accounts, for one), and shares two rare videos from the recording session.

The two acts weren’t nearly as close as they wanted you to think

When Aerosmith and Run-DMC first got together, the two acts often talked about how much they admired each other and how long they'd been fans. That wasn't exactly the whole truth.

"It became clear to me from doing my reporting that those guys did not really know each other,” Edgers says. "Run D.M.C. didn’t really admire Aerosmith." This all becomes especially evident in the MTV-shot videos Edgers uncovered. "You see that nervous laugh from Rick Rubin, and you see Jam Master Jay trying to save face."

There are moments during the clips where the awkwardness between the two groups is squirm-inducing. "Aerosmith was not at their peak, and they could have walked out," Edgers says. "[The men of Run-D.M.C.] were being kind of disrespectful—or, at least they weren’t being respectful—but you could see [Tyler and Perry] being patient. I mean, when Steven Tyler’s standing over Jam Master Jay while he shows [Tyler] how he uses the song, which is basically, "I don’t use your words.'"

Edgers had to separate the myth of this recording session from fact

Many of the participants in that March 1986 studio session were reluctant (at best) and none of them could have predicted what would become of their team-up. As a result, there’s no detailed log of the day and the ensuing years have warped many of the artists’ memories. Edgers had to sort through all of that.

One major mythology is that Run and D go to the basement to scribble down the words to [Aerosmith’s] Toys in the Attic," Edgers says. "They don’t want to come and do the song, so Jam Master Jay has to call them and threaten them to get them back [in the studio]. But there’s no way to pin down how long that was. Was it an hour? Was it a week? Was it a month? No one seems to have any idea, so you just have to say that."

In some cases, the discrepancies tell a better story than a straightforward answer ever could. Take, for instance, the iconic drumbeat in "Walk This Way." If you poll the members of Aerosmith, you’ll get a variety of answers as to who deserves credit. "The fact that they’re still arguing about that after all these years, I think that’s the point," Edgers says.

Both sides have complicated feelings about the song, both because of and in spite of its success

"I think that there’s still in Run and in Darryl a feeling that, 'Hey, I know that everyone knows ["Walk this Way"], but that’s not as good as 'Sucker M.C.’s' or 'Rock Box' [both off their self-titled debut LP]," Edgers says, considering how the men of Run DMC view the track many years removed from its release. "I think that bothers them—not enough to not like the song or not do the song, but it does bother them that everybody’s making such a fuss out of this cover of someone else’s song when the real fresh stuff was 'My Adidas.'"

The after-effects within Aerosmith have more to do with the song’s credits: Tyler and Perry excluded the rest of their band from the updated take. "There’s a lot of robbed feelings," Edgers says. "The old story was that they weren’t included because they weren’t in favor of [the team-up]. The new story, at least the story they tell me, is that they felt left out." He adds: "It’s kind of sad! I mean, even in the video, the director hired a fake backing band to support Tyler and Perry."

That the song changed music forever can’t be overstated

On a lesser scale, it introduced a new way for artists to release music that gains buzz: "Before 1986, you didn’t have Kanye [West] and Paul McCartney," Edgers says. "The word 'mashup' just didn’t exist! [And] it’s not only that. In the old days, Clark Gable or Frank Sinatra, these people were untouchable. They operated at a level above everything else. Today’s celebrities all like Carpool Karaoke or are happy to, like, 'Let’s do a spoof with Jimmy Fallon!' For me to go to any artist and say, 'Hey, why don’t you do this with this person?' I mean, I can’t imagine anything would surprise me at this point.

But most importantly, it’s the cut that introduced hip-hop to the mainstream. At the time of its release, MTV was not playing any rap, instead favoring the rock stars du jour. "If we just keep it in the '80s," begins Edgers, "this is before Yo! MTV Raps was even created; it was before [The Arsenio Hall Show], it was before In Living Color. It was before The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. [With this song], hip-hop became the main currency of our pop culture. Even if the Grammys have been dragged kicking and screaming to finally recognizing the genre, it is the music that makes us talk and think. It is the predominant music of our culture—and our marketing culture. Is that because these two sides got together? At the very least, it accelerated it dramatically."

Madison VainMadison Vain is a writer and editor living in New York, covering music, books, TV, and movies; prior to Esquire, she worked at Entertainment Weekly and Sports Illustrated.

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